Today's communications networks are often designed with built-in redundancy to increase availability. For example, enterprise Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) may be dual-homed across two gateway routers for routing and connectivity to external networks over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. One of the gateway routers may be designated as an active router and the second router may be designated as a standby router. The redundancy may be supported with floating virtual addresses using a redundancy protocol such as Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). The VRRP is configured on each VLAN interface that is connected to the gateway routers.
When a failover from the active gateway router to the standby gateway router occurs, all network elements that are connected to the gateway routers are notified about the failover. The network elements in turn create and send alarms to one or more fault management systems. Thus, for a failover of a gateway router, the fault management system may receive numerous redundant alarms for the same failure. Furthermore, the redundant alarms may create multiple tickets for a single cause. Processing of multiple tickets increases the cost of operating and maintaining the network.